September 30, 2010

Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye. On Monday, theWashington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners. As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting to review war policy. It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it -- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then-Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then-Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others.

Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment. Atop it is a soaring green line that represents the growing strength of the notoriously underwhelming “Afghan Forces,” military and police, as they move toward a theoretical goal of 400,000 -- an unlikely “end state” given present desertion rates. Underneath that green trajectory of putative success is a modest, herky-jerky blue curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.

The eye-catching detail, however, was the dating on the chart. Sometime between 2013 and 2016, according to a hesitant dotted white line (that left plenty of room for error), those U.S. surge forces would be drawn down radically enough to dip somewhere below -- don’t gasp -- the 68,000 level. In other words, three to six years from now, if all went as planned -- a radical unlikelihood, given the Afghan War so far -- the U.S. might be back close to the force levels of early 2009, before the President’s second surge was launched. (When Obama entered office, there were only 31,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.)

And when would those troops dwindle to near zero? 2019? 2025? The chart-makers were far too politic to include the years beyond January 1, 2016, so we have no way of knowing. But look at that chart and ask yourself: Is there any doubt that our high command, civilian and military, were dreaming of, and most forcefully recommending to the president, a forever war -- one which the Office of Budget and Management estimated would cost almost $900 billion?

Of course, as we now know, the military “lost” this battle. Instead of the 40,000 troops they desired, they “only” got 30,000 from a frustrated president (plus a few thousand support troops the Secretary of Defense was allowed to slip in, and some special operations forces that no one was putting much effort into counting, and don’t forget those extra troops wrung out of NATO as well as small allies who, for a price, couldn’t say no -- all of which added up to a figure suspiciously close to the 10,000 the president had officially denied his war commanders).

When, on December 1, 2009, Barack Obama addressed the cadets of West Point and, through them, the rest of us to announce the second surge of his presidency, he was at least able to slip in a date to begin a drawdown of U.S. forces. (“But taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”) Hardly a nanosecond passed, however, before -- first “on background” and soon enough in public -- administration spokespeople rushed to reassure the rest of Washington that such a transfer would be “conditions based.” Given conditions there since 2001, not exactly a reassuring statement.

Meanwhile, days before the speech, Afghan war commander McChrystal was already hard at work stretching out the time of the drawdown date the president was still to announce. It would, he claimed, begin “sometime before 2013.” More recently, deified new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus has repeatedly assured everyone in sight that none of this drawdown talk will add up to a hill of beans.

More, Never Less

Let’s keep two things in mind here: just how narrow were the options the president considered, and just how large was the surge he reluctantly launched. By the end of the fall of 2009, it was common knowledge in Washington that the administration’s fiercely debated Afghan War “review” never considered a “less” option, only ones involving “more.” Now, thanks to Woodward, we can put definitive numbers to those options. The least of the "more" options was Vice President Biden’s “counterterrorism-plus” strategy, focused on more trainers for the Afghan military and police plus more drone attacks and Special Forces operations. It involved a surge of 20,000 U.S. troops. According to Woodward, the military commanders, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Secretary of Defense more or less instantly ruled this out.

The military’s chosen option was for those 40,000 troops and an emphasis on counterinsurgency. Between them lay a barely distinguishable 30,000-35,000 option. The only other option mentioned during the review process involved a surge of 85,000, and it, too, was ruled out by the military because troops in that quantity simply weren’t available. This, then, was the full “range” of debate in Washington about the Afghan War. No wonder the president, according to Woodward, exclaimed in anger, "So what's my option? You have given me one option."

It’s also important to remember that this round of surgification involved a lot more than those 30,000 troops and various add-ons. After all, the “president” -- and when you read Woodward, you do wonder whether a modern president isn’t, in many ways, simply a prisoner of Washington -- also managed to surge CIA personnel, triple State Department, USAID, and other civilian personnel, and expand the corps of private contractors.

Perhaps more significant, that December the president and his key advisors set the Af/Pak War -- to use the new term of that moment -- on an ever widening gyre. Among other things, that escalation included a significant acceleration in U.S. base-building activity which has yet to end; a massive increase in the CIA’s drone war over the Pakistani tribal borderlands (a quadrupling of attacks since the last year of the Bush administration, including at least 22 attacks launched this September, the most yet in a month); a recent uptick in Air Force bombing activity over Afghanistan (which General McChrystal actually cut back for a while), an increase in Special Operations activity throughout Afghanistan; and an increase in border crossings into Pakistan.

The last of these, in particular, reflects the increasing frustration of American commanders fighting a war going badly in Afghanistan in which key enemies have sanctuaries across the border. Thanks to Woodward’s book, we now know that, in 2002, the Bush administration allowed the CIA to organize a secret Afghan “paramilitary army,”modeled after the U.S. Special Forces and divided into “counterterrorist pursuit teams.” Three thousand in all, these irregulars have operated as proxy fighters and assassins in Afghanistan -- and, in the Obama era, they have evidently also been venturing into the Pakistani tribal borderlands where those CIA drone attacks are already part of everyday life. In addition, just days ago, U.S. helicopters upped the ante in the first of two such incidents by venturing across the same border to attack retreating Taliban fighters in what U.S. military spokespeople have termed “self-defense,” but what was known in the Vietnam era as “hot pursuit.”

In addition, U.S. military commanders, the New York Timesreports, are threatening worse. (“As evidence of the growing frustration of American officials, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has recently issued veiled warnings to top Pakistani commanders that the United States could launch unilateral ground operations in the tribal areas should Pakistan refuse to dismantle the militant networks in North Waziristan, according to American officials.”) In the next year, that label “Af/Pak” could come into its own as a war-fighting reality.

All of this is, of course, part of the unspoken Pentagon doctrine of forever war. And lest you think that the 2016 date for an Afghan drawdown was a one-of-a-kind bit of planning, consider this line from a recent New York Timesreport by Michael Gordon and John Burns on Pentagon anxiety over the new British government's desire to cut defense spending by up to 20%: “American and British officials said that they did not expect any cutbacks to curtail Britain’s capabilities to fight in Afghanistan over the next five years.” Let that sink in for a moment: “over the next five years.” It obviously reflects the thinking of anonymous officials of some significance and, if you do the modest math, you once again find yourself more or less at January 1, 2016. In a just released Rolling Stone interview, even the President can be found saying, vaguely but ominously, of the Afghan War: "[I]t's going to take us several years to work through this issue."

Or consider the three $100 million bases (or parts of bases) that Walter Pincus of the Washington Postreported the Pentagon is now preparing to build in Afghanistan. These, he adds, won’t be ready for use until, at best, “later in 2011,” well after the Obama troop drawdown is set to begin. According to Noah Shachtman of the Danger Room blog, one $100 million upgrade for a future Special Operations headquarters in northern Afghanistan, when done, will include: a “communications building, Tactical Operations Center, training facility, medical aid station, Vehicle Maintenance Facility... dining facility, laundry facility, and a kennel to support working dogs... Supporting facilities include roads, power production system and electrical distribution, water well, non-potable water production, water storage, water distribution, sanitary sewer collection system, communication manhole/duct system, curbs, walkways, drainage, and parking. Additionally, the project will include site preparation and compound security measures to include guard towers.”

A State of War to the Horizon

Tell me: Does this sound like a military getting ready to leave town any time soon?

And don’t forget the $1.3 billion in funds pending in Congress that Pincus tells us the Pentagon has requested “for multiyear construction of military facilities in Afghanistan.” We’re obviously talking 2012 to 2015 here, too. Or how about the $6.2 billion a year that the Pentagon is projected to spend on the training of Afghan forces from 2012 through 2016? Or what about the Pentagon contract TomDispatch’s Nick Turse dug up that was awarded to private contractor SOS International primarily for translators with an estimated completion date of September 2014? Or how about the gigantic embassy-cum-command-center-cum-citadel (modeled on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, now the largest in the world) which the Obama administration has decided to build in Islamabad, Pakistan?

And let’s not leave out the Army’s incessant planning for the distant future embodied in a recently published report, “Operating Concept, 2016-2028,” overseen by Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, a senior advisor to Gen. David Petraeus. It opts to ditch “Buck Rogers” visions of futuristic war, and instead to imagine counterinsurgency operations, grimly referred to as "wars of exhaustion," in one, two, many Afghanistans to the distant horizon.

So here’s one way to think about all this: like people bingeing on anything, the present Pentagon and military cast of characters can’t stop themselves. They really can’t. The thought that in Afghanistan or anywhere else they might have to go on a diet, as sooner or later they will, is deeply unnerving. Forever war is in their blood, so much so that they’re ready to face down the commander-in-chief, if necessary, to make it continue. This is really the definition of an addiction -- not to victory, but to the state of war itself. Don’t expect them to discipline themselves. They won’t.

September 26, 2010

Once a serious journalist, the Washington Post’s Bob
Woodward now makes a very fine living as chief gossip-monger of the
governing class. Early on in his career, along with Carl Bernstein, his
partner at the time, Woodward confronted power. Today, by relentlessly
exalting Washington trivia, he flatters power. His reporting does not
inform. It titillates.

A new Woodward book, Obama’s Wars, is a guaranteed
blockbuster. It’s out this week, already causing a stir, and guaranteed
to be forgotten the week after dropping off the bestseller lists. For
good reason: when it comes to substance, any book written by Woodward
has about as much heft as the latest potboiler penned by the likes of
James Patterson or Tom Clancy.

Back in 2002, for example, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Woodward treated us to Bush at War. Based
on interviews with unidentified officials close to President George W.
Bush, the book offered a portrait of the
president-as-resolute-war-leader that put him in a league with Abraham
Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But the book’s real juice came from
what it revealed about events behind the scenes. “Bush’s war cabinet is
riven with feuding,” reported the Times of
London, which credited Woodward with revealing “the furious arguments
and personal animosity” that divided Bush’s lieutenants.

Of course, the problem with the Bush administration wasn’t that folks
on the inside didn’t play nice with one another. No, the problem was
that the president and his inner circle committed a long series of
catastrophic errors that produced an unnecessary and grotesquely
mismanaged war. That war has cost the country dearly -- although the
people who engineered that catastrophe, many of them having pocketed
handsome advances on their forthcoming memoirs, continue to manage quite
well, thank you.

To judge by the publicity blitzkrieg announcing the arrival of Obama’s Wars in your local bookstore, the
big news out of Washington is that, even today, politics there remains
an intensely competitive sport, with the participants, whether in anger
or frustration, sometimes speaking ill of one another.

Essentially, news reports indicate, Woodward has updated his script
from 2002. The characters have different names, but the plot remains
the same. Talk about jumping the shark.

So
we learn that Obama political adviser David Axelrod doesn’t fully trust
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. National security adviser James
Jones, a retired Marine general, doesn’t much care
for the likes of Axelrod, and will say so behind his back. Almost
everyone thinks Richard Holbrooke, chief State Department impresario of
the AfPak portfolio, is a jerk. And -- stop the presses -- when under
the influence of alcohol, General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and
allied forces in Afghanistan, is alleged to use the word “f**ked.” These are the sort of shocking revelations that make you a headliner on the Sunday morning talk shows.

Based on what we have learned so far from those select few provided with advance copies of the book -- mostly reporters for the Post and The New York Times who, for whatever reason, seem happy to serve as its shills -- Obama’s Wars contains hints of another story, the significance of which seems to have eluded Woodward.

The theme of that story is not whether Dick likes Jane, but whether
the Constitution remains an operative document. The Constitution
explicitly assigns to the president the role of commander-in-chief.
Responsibility for the direction of American wars rests with him.
According to the principle of civilian control, senior military
officers advise and execute, but it's the president who decides. That's
the theory, at least. Reality turns out to be considerably different
and, to be kind about it, more complicated.

Obama’s Wars reportedly contains this commentby
President Obama to Secretary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates regarding Afghanistan: "I'm not doing 10 years... I'm not doing
long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars."

Aren’t you, Mr. President? Don’t be so sure.

Obama’s Wars also affirms what we already suspected about the decision-making process that led up to the president’s announcement
at West Point in December 2009 to prolong and escalate the war.
Bluntly put, the Pentagon gamed the process to exclude any possibility
of Obama rendering a decision not to its liking.

Pick your surge: 20,000
troops? Or 30,000 troops? Or 40,000 troops? Only the most powerful
man in the world -- or Goldilocks contemplating three bowls of porridge
-- could handle a decision like that. Even as Obama opted for the
middle course, the real decision had already been made elsewhere by
others: the war in Afghanistan would expandand continue.

And then there’s this
from the estimable General David Petraeus: "I don't think you win this
war,” Woodward quotes the field commander as saying. “I think you keep
fighting... This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives
and probably our kids' lives."

Here we confront a series of questions to which Woodward (not to
mention the rest of Washington) remains steadfastly oblivious. Why
fight a war that even the general in charge says can’t be won? What
will the perpetuation of this conflict cost? Who will it benefit? Does
the ostensibly most powerful nation in the world have no choice but to
wage permanent war? Are there no alternatives? Can Obama shut
down an unwinnable war now about to enter its tenth year? Or is he --
along with the rest of us -- a prisoner of war?

President Obama has repeatedly stated that in July 2011 a withdrawal
of U. S. troops from Afghanistan will commence. No one quite knows
exactly what that means. Will the withdrawal be symbolic? General
Petraeus has already made it abundantly clear
that he will entertain nothing more. Or will July signal that the
Afghan War -- and by extension the Global War on Terror launched nine
years ago -- is finally coming to an end?

Between now and next summer attentive Americans will learn much about
how national security policy is actually formulated and who is really
in charge. Just don’t expect Bob Woodward to offer any enlightenment on
the subject.

September 24, 2010

“Make poverty history!” A catchy slogan, and an admirable aim, it
was adopted by world leaders at the United Nations summit in New York
on the eve of the New Millennium. A decade later, it is America which
has made history -- even ifin the opposite direction.
The latest U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that, in 2009, one in
seven Americans was living below the poverty line, the highest figure
in half a century. Last month’s 95,000-plus home foreclosures broke all
records.

These were only two of the recent glaring signs of the sagging might
of the globe’s “sole superpower,” now heavily indebted to Beijing.
Other recent indicators include its failure to corral China into
revaluing its currency, the yuan, against the dollar, and to compel
Russia, China, India, or even Pakistan to follow its lead in
suppressing the oil and natural gas trade with Iran. With Washington
failing to impose its monetary or energy policies on the rest of the
world, we have entered a new era in history.

America’s Struggling Economy

It’s crystal clear that jobs and the economy have emerged as the key
preoccupations of American voters as they approach the November 2nd
midterm Congressional elections.

The economic “recovery” is proving anemic. An already weak gross
domestic product (GDP) growth figure, 2.4% for the second quarter of
2010, was recently revised downward to 1.6%, and the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, consisting of the globe’s 30
richest countries, has predicted a paltry 1.2% U.S. expansion in the
fourth quarter of the year.

Soon after retiring as vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve, where
he served for 40 years, Donald Kohn summed up the dire situation in
this way: “The U.S. economy is in a slow slog out of a very deep hole.”

Consider one measure of the depth of that hole: between December
2007 -- the official start of the Great Recession -- and December 2009,
the American economy made eight million workers redundant. Even if the
job market were to improve to the level of the boom years of the 1990s,
it would still take until March 2014 simply to halve the present 9.6%
unemployment rate and return it to a pre-recession 4.7%. Little wonder
that James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank,
warned of the American economy creeping closer to the black-hole years
of deflation experienced by Japan in the 1990s.

By now, the Obama administration’s $862 billion stimulus plan has
largely worked its way through the system without having had much
impact on job creation. And keep in mind that the high official
unemployment rate is significantly less than the real figure. It
doesn’t take into account part-time workers who would prefer full-time
jobs, or those who have stopped seeking employment after countless
failed attempts. In the end, the administration’s policy makers seem to
have failed to grasp that a recession caused by a banking crisis is
always much worse than a non-banking one.

China Roars Ahead

Just as the Obama administration revised those anemic GDP growth
rates downward, China’s economy was passing Japan’s to become the
second largest on the planet. While the Chinese GDP is steaming ahead
at an annual expansion rate of 10%, Japan’s is crawling at 0.4%.

China’s leaders responded to the 2008-2009 recession in the West
that led to a fall in their country’s exports by quickly changing their
priorities. They moved decisively to boost domestic demand and
infrastructure investment by sinking money into improving public
services.

While Western governments tried to overcome the investment slump at
the core of the Great Recession indirectly through deficit spending,
China raised its public expenditures through its state-controlled
banks. They provided easy credit for the purchase of consumer durables
like cars and new homes. In addition, the government invested funds in
improving public services like health care, which had deteriorated in
the wake of the economic liberalization of the previous three decades.

Altogether,
these measures boosted the GDP growth rate to 9% in 2009, just when the
American economy was shrinking by 2.6%. Such a performance impressed
the leaders of many developing countries, who concluded that China’s
state-directed model of economic expansion was far more suitable for
their citizens than the West’s private-enterprise-driven one.

On the ideological plane, the spectacular failure of the Western
banking system on which the private sector rests revived socialist
ardor, long on the wane, among China’s policymakers. In response, they
decided to bolster state-controlled companies, proving wrong Western
analysts who bet that public-sector undertakings would lose out to
their private-sector counterparts.

The upsurge in government spending and generous bank lending
policies led to increased investments by state-owned companies. Whether
engaged in extracting coal and oil, producing steel, or ferrying
passengers and cargo, such companies found themselves amply funded to
upgrade their industrial and service bases, a process that created more
jobs. In addition, they began to enter new fields like real estate.

Overall, the Great Recession in the West, triggered primarily by
Wall Street’s excesses, provided an opportunity for Beijing to stress
that, in socialist China, private capital had only a secondary role to
play. “The socialist system’s advantages enable us to make decisions
efficiently, organize effectively, and concentrate resources to
accomplish large undertakings,” said Prime Minster Wen Jiabao in his
address to the annual session of the National People’s Congress in
March.

The Sacred Yuan and Gunboat Diplomacy

In March and early April, there was much sound and fury at the White
House about China's currency, the yuan, being undervalued, and so
giving Chinese exporters an unfair advantage over their American
rivals. This assessment was faithfully echoed by a compliant media.
Pundits anticipated a U.S. Treasury report due in mid-April condemning
China’s manipulation of its currency, a preamble to raising tariffs on
Chinese imports. Nothing of the sort happened.

Instead, the Treasury delayed its report for three months. When
released, it said that, while the yuan remained undervalued, China had
made a “significant” move in June by ending its policy of pegging its
currency tightly to the dollar. Hard facts belie that statement,
highlightingthe former sole superpower’s impotency in
its dealings with fast-rising Beijing. Between early April and
mid-September, the yuan appreciated by a “significant” 1%.

More worrying to White House policymakers is the way Beijing is
translating its economic muscle into military and diplomatic power.
The controversy surrounding the sinking of the South Korean patrol ship
Cheonan in March is a case in point. Following a report in May
by a team of American, British, and Swedish experts that a North Korean
torpedo had destroyed the vessel, the U.S. and South Korea announced
joint naval exercises in the Yellow Sea off the west coast of the
Korean Peninsula. China protested. It argued that, since the planned
military drill was very close to its territorial waters, it threatened
its security. Later that month at a South Korea-Japan-China summit,
Chinese Premier Wen refrained from naming North Korea as the culprit
and instead emphasized the need to reduce tensions on the Korean
peninsula.

Washington ignored Beijing’s advice. It went ahead with its joint
naval maneuvers in early July. Six weeks later, it announced another
such drill in the Yellow Sea for early September. Incensed, Beijing
responded by conducting its own three-day-long naval exercises in the
same maritime space. Breaking with normal protocol, it gave them wide
publicity. Unexpectedly, nature intervened. A tropical storm
approaching the Yellow Sea compelled the Pentagon to postpone its joint
maneuvers.

By then, Beijing had locked horns with Washington, challenging the
latter’s claim that the Yellow Sea is an international waterway, open
to all shipping, including warships. This is an unmistakable sign that
the Chinese Navy is preparing to extend its reach beyond its coastal
waters. Indeed, plans are clearly now afoot to extend operations into
the parts of the Pacific previously dominated by the U.S. Navy.

China’s naval high command now openly talks of dispatching warships
to the waters between the Malacca Strait and the Persian Gulf,
principally to safeguard the sea lanes used to carry oil to the
People’s Republic of China.

Washington’s Iran Policy Challenged

As China’s third biggest supplier of petroleum (after Saudi Arabia
and Angola), Iran figures prominently on Beijing’s radar screen. So
far, Chinese energy corporations, all state-owned, have invested $40
billion in the Islamic Republic's hydrocarbon sector. They are also
poised to participate in the building of seven oil refineries in Iran.
When, earlier this year, European Union (EU) companies stopped
supplying gasoline to Iran, which imports 40% of its needs, Chinese oil
corporations stepped in. That was how in 2009, with a $21.2 billion
dollar two-way commerce, China surpassed the EU as Iran’s number one
trading partner. It is estimated that China-Iran trade will rise by 50%
in 2010.

Like Russia, China backed a fourth set of United Nations economic
sanctions on Iran in June only after Washington agreed that the
Security Council resolution would not include provisions that might
hurt the Iranian people. Therefore, the resulting resolution did not
outlaw either investment or participation in the Iranian oil and gas
industry.

Much to Moscow’s chagrin, on July 1st, President Obama signed the
Comprehensive Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010
(CISADA) into law. It banned the export of petroleum products to Iran
and severely restricted investment in its hydrocarbon industry. It
also contained a provision that authorized the White House to penalize
any entity in the world violating the act by restricting its commercial
dealings with U.S. banks or the government.

Two weeks later, Russian oil minister Sergey Shmatko struck back. He
announced that his country would be “developing and widening” already
existing cooperation with the Islamic Republic’s oil sector. “We are
neighbors,” he emphasized. Russian oil companies were, he added, free
to sell gasoline to Iran and ship it across the Caspian Sea, which the
two countries share. The Kremlin also warned that if Washington chose
to penalize Russian companies for their actions in Iran, it would
retaliate. The Russian ambassador to the U.N., Vitaly Cherkin, stated
categorically that Russia had closed the door to any further tightening
of the sanctions against Iran.

As promised publicly and repeatedly, in August the Russians finally
commissioned the civilian nuclear power plant near Bushehr, which they
had contracted to build in 1994. It meets all the conditions of the
International Atomic Energy Agency. Russia will provide it with nuclear
rods and remove its spent fuel which could be used to produce weapons.

Little wonder, then, that Russia and China appear on the list of the
22 nations that do “significant business” with Iran, according to the
White House. What surprised many American analysts was the appearance
of India on that list, which reflected their failure to grasp a salient
fact: “energy security trumps all” is increasingly the driving
principle behind the foreign policies of a variety of rising nations.

Soon after the enactment of CISADA, India's Foreign Secretary
Nirupama Rao stated that her government was worried “unilateral
sanctions recently imposed by individual countries [could] have a
direct and adverse impact on Indian companies and, more importantly, on
our energy security.” Her statement won widespread praise in the Indian
press, resentful of foreign interference in the hallowed sanctum of
energy security. Delhi responded to CISADA by reviving the idea of
building a 680-mile marine gas pipeline from Iran to India at a cost of
$4 billion.

More remarkably, Washington’s policy has even been sabotaged by
political entities which are parasitically dependent on its goodwill or
largess.

In a black-market trade of monumental proportions, more than 1,000
tanker trucks filled with petroleum products cross from oil-rich Iraqi
Kurdistan into Iran every day. On the Kurdish side, the profits from
this illicit energy trade go to the governing Kurdish political parties
which have been tightly tied to Washington since the end of the First
Gulf War in 1991.

An even more blatant example of defiance of Washington in the name
of energy was provided by Pakistan which would be unable to stand on
its feet without the economic crutches provided by America. In
January, Washington pressured Islamabad to abandon a 690-mile
Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project that has been on the planning boards
for the past few years. Islamabad refused. In March, its
representatives signed an agreement with the Iranians. And a month
later, Iran announced that it had completed construction of the 630
miles of the pipeline on its soil, and that Iranian gas would start
flowing into Pakistan in 2014.

An Irreversible Trend

In whole regions of the world, U.S. power is in flux, but on the
whole in retreat. The United States remains a powerful nation with a
military to match. It still has undeniable heft on the global stage,
but its power slippage is no less real for that -- and, by any measure,
irreversible. Whatever the twenty-first century may prove to be, it
will not be the American century.

Those familiar with stock exchanges know that the share price of a
dwindling company does not go over a cliff in a free fall. It declines,
attracts new buyers, recovers much of its lost ground, only to fall
further the next time around. Such is the case with U.S. “stock” in the
world. The peak American moment as the sole superpower is now well past
-- and there’s no overall recovery in sight, only a marginal chance of
success in areas such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where the
United States remains the only major power whose clout counts.

For almost a decade, Washington poured huge amounts of money, blood,
military power, and diplomatic capital into self-inflicted wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, the U.S. lost ground in South America
and all of Africa, even Egypt. Its long-running wars also highlighted
the limitations of the power of conventional weaponry and the military
doctrine of applying overwhelming force against the enemy.

As the high command at the Pentagon trains a whole new generation of
soldiers and officers in counterinsurgency warfare, which requires the
arduous, time-consuming tasks of mastering alien cultures and foreign
languages, "the enemy," well versed in the use of the Internet,
will forge new tactics. Given the growing economic strength of China,
Brazil, and India, among other rising powers, U.S. influence will
continue to wane. The American power outage is, by any measure,
irreversible.

September 20, 2010

If you want to know which way the global wind is blowing (or the sun
shining or the coal burning), watch China. That’s the news for our
energy future and for the future of great-power politics on planet
Earth. Washington is already watching -- with anxiety.

Rarely has a simple press interview said more about the global power
shifts taking place in our world. On July 20th, the chief economist of
the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, told the Wall Street Journal
that China had overtaken the United States to become the world’s number
one energy consumer. One can read this development in many ways: as
evidence of China’s continuing industrial prowess, of the lingering
recession in the United States, of the growing popularity of
automobiles in China, even of America’s superior energy efficiency as
compared to that of China. All of these observations are valid, but
all miss the main point: by becoming the world’s leading energy
consumer, China will also become an ever more dominant international
actor and so set the pace in shaping our global future.

Because energy is tied to so many aspects of the global economy, and
because doubts are growing about the future availability of oil and
other vital fuels, the decisions China makes regarding its energy
portfolio will have far-reaching consequences. As the leading player
in the global energy market, China will significantly determine not
only the prices we will be paying for critical fuels but also the type
of energy systems we will come to rely on. More importantly, China’s
decisions on energy preferences will largely determine whether China
and the United States can avoid becoming embroiled in a global struggle
over imported oil and whether the world will escape catastrophic
climate change.

How to Rise to Global Preeminence

You can’t really appreciate the significance of China’s newfound
energy prominence if you don’t first grasp the role of energy in
America’s rise to global preeminence.

That the northeastern region of the young United States was richly
endowed with waterpower and coal deposits was critical to the country’s
early industrialization as well as to the North’s eventual victory in
the Civil War. It was the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania in
1859, however, that would turn the U.S. into the decisive actor on the
global stage. Oil extraction and exports fueled American prosperity in
the early twentieth century -- a time when the country was the planet’s
leading producer -- while nurturing the rise of its giant corporations.

It should never be forgotten that the world’s first great transnational corporation -- John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company
-- was founded on the exploitation and export of American petroleum.
Anti-trust legislation would break up Standard Oil in 1911, but two of
its largest descendants, Standard Oil of New York and Standard Oil of
New Jersey, were later fused into what is now the world’s wealthiest
publicly traded enterprise, ExxonMobil. Another descendant, Standard Oil of California, became Chevron -- today, the third richest American corporation.

Oil also played a key role in the rise of the United States as the
world’s preeminent military power. This country supplied most of the
oil consumed by Allied forces in both World War I and World War II.
Among the great powers of the time, the U.S. alone was self-sufficient
in oil, which meant it could deploy massive armies to Europe and Asia
and overpower the well-equipped (but oil-starved) German and Japanese
militaries. Few realize this today, but for the architects of
America’s victory in the Second World War, including President
Roosevelt, it was the nation’s superior endowment of petroleum, not the
atom bomb, that proved decisive.

Having created an economy and military establishment based on oil,
American leaders were compelled to employ ever more costly and
desperate measures to ensure that both always had an adequate supply of
energy. After World War II, with domestic reserves already beginning
to shrink, a succession of presidents fashioned a global strategy based
on ensuring American access to overseas petroleum.

As a start, Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf kingdoms were
chosen to serve as overseas “filling stations” for U.S. refiners and
military forces. American oil companies, especially the descendants of
Standard Oil, were aided and abetted in establishing a major presence
in these countries. To a considerable extent, in fact, the great
postwar strategic pronouncements -- the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower
Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, and especially the Carter Doctrine -- were all tied to the protection of these “filling stations.”

Today, too, oil plays a critical role in Washington’s global plans
and actions. The Department of State, for example, still maintains an
elaborate, costly, and deeply entrenched
military capability in the Persian Gulf to ensure the “safety” and
“security” of oil exports from the region. It has also extended its
military reach to such key oil-producing regions as the Caspian Sea
basin and western Africa. The need to retain friendly ties and
military relationships with key suppliers like Kuwait, Nigeria, and
Saudi Arabia continues to dominate U.S. foreign policy. Similarly, in
a globally warming world, a growing American interest in the melting Arctic is being propelled by a desire to exploit the polar region’s untapped hydrocarbon reserves.

Planet Coal?

The fact that China has now overtaken the United States as the
world’s leading energy consumer is bound to radically alter its global
policies, just as energy predominance once did America’s. No doubt
this will, in turn, alter the course of Sino-American relations, not to
speak of world affairs. With the American experience in mind, what can
we expect from China?

As a start, no one reading newspaper business pages could have any doubt that Chinese leaders view energy as a -- possibly the
-- major concern of the country and have been devoting substantial
resources and planning to the procurement of adequate future supplies.
In addressing this task, Chinese leaders face two fundamental
challenges: securing sufficient energy to meet ever-rising demand and
deciding which fuels to rely on in satisfying these requirements. How
China responds to these challenges will have striking implications on
the global stage.

According to the most recent projections
from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), Chinese energy consumption
will grow by 133% between 2007 and 2035 -- from, that is, 78 to 182
quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs). Think about it this way: the
104 quadrillion BTUs that China will somehow have to add to its energy
supply over the next quarter-century equals the total energy
consumption of Europe and the Middle East in 2007. Finding and
funneling so much oil, natural gas, and other fuels to China is
undoubtedly going to be the single greatest economic and industrial
challenge facing Beijing -- and in that challenge lays the possibility
of real friction and conflict.

Although most of the country’s energy funds are still expended
domestically, what it spends on imported fuels (oil, coal, natural gas,
and uranium) and energy equipment (oil refineries, power plants, and
nuclear reactors) will significantly determine the global price of
these items -- a role that, until now, has been largely filled by the
United States. More important, however, will be the decisions China
makes about the types of energy it will come to rely on.

If Chinese leaders were to follow their natural inclinations, they
would undoubtedly avoid relying on imported fuels altogether, given how
vulnerable foreign-energy dependence can make a country to overseas
supply disruptions or, in China’s case, a possible U.S. naval blockade
(in the event, say, of a prolonged conflict over Taiwan). Li Junfeng,
a senior Chinese energy official, was recently quoted as saying, “Energy supply should be where you can plant your foot on it” -- that is, from domestic sources.

China does possess one kind of fuel in abundance: coal. According
to the most recent DoE projections, coal will make up an estimated 62%
of China’s net energy supply in 2035, only slightly less than at
present. A heavy reliance on coal, however, will exacerbate the
country’s environmental problems, dragging down its economy as health-care costs mount. In addition, thanks to coal, China is now the world’s leading emitter
of climate-altering carbon dioxide. According to the DoE, China’s
share of global carbon-dioxide emissions will jump from 19.6% in 2005,
when it barely trailed the U.S. at 21.1%, to 31.4% in 2035, when it
will tower over all other countries in net emissions.

As long as Beijing refuses to significantly reduce its reliance on
coal, ignore its rhetoric on global-warming negotiations. It simply
won’t be able to take truly meaningful steps to address climate
change. In this way, too, it will alter the face of the planet.

Recently, the country’s leaders seem to have become far more sensitive to the risks of excessive reliance on coal. Massive emphasis
is now being placed on the development of renewable energy systems,
especially wind and solar power. Already, China has become the world’s
leading producer of wind turbines and solar panels, and has already
begun exporting its technology to the United States. (Some economists
and labor unions, in fact, claim that China is unfairly subsidizing its renewable-energy exports in violation of World Trade Organization rules.)

China’s growing emphasis on renewable energy would be good news, if
it resulted in substantial reductions in coal use. At the same time,
the country’s drive to excel at these techniques could push it into the
forefront of a technological revolution, just as early American
dominance of petroleum technology propelled it to the front ranks of
world powers in the twentieth century. If the United States fails to
keep pace, it could find the pace of its decline as a world power
quickening.

Whose Saudis Are They?

China’s thirst for added energy could also lead quickly enough to
friction and conflict with the United States, especially in the global
competition for increasingly scarce supplies of imported petroleum. As
its energy use ramps ever upward, China is using more oil, which can
only lead to greater political economic, political, and someday
possibly even military involvement in the oil-producing regions --
areas long viewed in Washington as constituting America’s private
offshore energy preserves.

As recently as 1995, China only consumed
about 3.4 million barrels of oil per day -- one-fifth the amount used
by the United States, the world’s top consumer, and two-thirds of the
amount burned by Japan, then number two. Since China pumped 2.9
million barrels per day from its domestic fields that year, its import
burden was a mere 500,000 barrels per day at a time when the U.S.
imported 9.4 million barrels and Japan 5.3 million barrels.

By 2009, China was in the number-two spot at 8.6 million barrels per
day, which still fell far below America’s 18.7 million barrels. At 3.8
million barrels per day, however, domestic production wasn’t keeping
pace -- the very problem the U.S. had faced in the Cold War era. China
was already importing 4.8 million barrels per day, far more than Japan
(which had actually reduced its reliance on oil) and nearly half as
much as the United States. In the decades to come, these numbers are
guaranteed only to get worse.

According to the DoE, China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s
leading oil importer, at an estimated 10.6 million barrels per day,
sometime around 2030. (Some experts believe this shift could occur far
sooner.) Whatever the year, China’s leaders are already enmeshed in
the same power “predicament” long faced by their American counterparts,
dependent as they are on a vital substance that can only be acquired
from a handful of unreliable producers in areas of chronic crisis and
conflict.

At present, China obtains most of its imported oil
from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Angola, Oman, Sudan, Kuwait, Russia,
Kazakhstan, Libya, and Venezuela. Eager to ensure the reliability of
the oil flow from these countries, Beijing has established close ties
with their leaders, in some cases providing them with significant
economic and military assistance. This is exactly the path once taken
by Washington -- and with some of the same countries.

China’s state-controlled energy firms have also forged “strategic
partnerships” with counterpart enterprises in these countries and in
some cases acquired
the right to develop major oil deposits as well. Especially striking
has been the way Beijing has sought to undercut U.S. influence in Saudi
Arabia and with other crucial Persian Gulf oil producers. In 2009,
China imported
more Saudi oil than the U.S. for the first time, a geopolitical shift
of great significance, given the history of U.S.-Saudi relations.
Although not competing with Washington when it comes to military aid,
Beijing has been dispatching its top leaders to woo Riyadh, promising
to support Saudi aspirations without employing the human rights or
pro-democracy rhetoric usually associated with American foreign policy.

Much of this should sound exceedingly familiar. After all, the
United States once wooed the Saudis in a similar way when Washington
first began viewing the kingdom as its overseas filling station and
turned it into an unofficial military protectorate. In 1945, while
World War II still raged, President Roosevelt made a special trip to
meet with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia and establish a
protection-for-oil arrangement that persists to this day. Not
surprisingly, American leaders don’t see (or care to recognize) the
analogy; instead, top officials look askance at the way China is
poaching on U.S. turf in Saudi Arabia and other petro-states,
portraying such moves as antagonistic.

As China’s reliance on these overseas suppliers grows, it is likely
to bolster its ties with their leaders, producing further strains in
the international political environment. Already, Beijing’s reluctance
to jeopardize its vital energy links with Iran has frustrated U.S.
efforts to impose tough new economic sanctions on that country as a way
of forcing it to abandon its uranium-enrichment activities. Likewise,
China’s recent loan
of $20 billion to the Venezuelan oil industry has boosted the status of
President Hugo Chávez at a time when his domestic popularity, and so
his ability to counter U.S. policies, was slipping. The Chinese have
also retained friendly ties with President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir
of Sudan, despite U.S. efforts to paint him as an international pariah
because of his alleged role in overseeing the massacres in Darfur.

Arms-for-Oil Diplomacy on a Dangerous Planet

Already, China’s efforts to bolster its ties with its foreign-oil
providers have produced geopolitical friction with the United States.
There is a risk of far more serious Sino-American conflict as we enter
the “tough oil” era and the world supply of easily accessible petroleum rapidly shrinks. According to the DoE,
the global supply of oil and other petroleum liquids in 2035 will be
110.6 million barrels per day – precisely enough to meet anticipated
world demand at that time. Many oil geologists believe, however, that
global oil output will reach a peak level
of output well below 100 million barrels per day by 2015, and begin
declining after that. In addition, the oil that remains will
increasingly be found in difficult places to reach or in highly
unstable regions. If these predictions prove accurate, the United
States and China -- the world’s two leading oil importers -- could
become trapped in a zero-sum great-power contest for access to
diminishing supplies of exportable petroleum.

What will happen under these circumstances is, of course, impossible
to predict, especially since the potential for conflict abounds. If
both countries continue on their current path -- arming favored
suppliers in a desperate bid to secure long-term advantage -- the
heavily armed petro-states may also become ever more fearful of, or
covetous of, their (equally well-equipped) neighbors. With both the
U.S. and China deploying growing numbers of military advisers
and instructors to such countries, the stage could be set for mutual
involvement in local wars and border conflicts. Neither Beijing nor
Washington may seek such involvement, but the logic of arms-for-oil
diplomacy makes this an unavoidable risk.

It is not hard, then, to picture a future moment when the United
States and China are locked in a global struggle over the world’s
remaining supplies of oil. Indeed, many in official Washington believe
that such a collision is nearly inevitable. “China’s near-term focus
on preparing for contingencies in the Taiwan Strait… is an important
driver of its [military] modernization,” the Department of Defense
noted in the 2008 edition of its annual report, The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China.
“However, analysis of China’s military acquisitions and strategic
thinking suggests Beijing is also developing capabilities for use in
other contingencies, such as a conflict over resources...”

Conflict over planetary oil reserves is not, however, the only path
that China’s new energy status could open. It is possible to imagine a
future in which China and the United States cooperate in pursuing oil
alternatives that would obviate the need to funnel massive sums into
naval and military arms races. President Obama and his Chinese
counterpart, Hu Jintao, seemed to glimpse such a possibility when they agreed
last November, during an economic summit in Beijing, to collaborate in
the development of alternative fuels and transportation systems.

At this point, only one thing is clear: the greater China’s reliance
on imported petroleum, the greater the risk of friction and conflict
with the United States, which relies on the same increasingly
problematic suppliers of energy. The greater its reliance on coal, the
less comfortable our planet will become. The greater its emphasis on
alternative fuels, the more likely it may make the twenty-first century
China’s domain. At this point, how China will apportion its energy
needs among the various candidate fuels remains unknown. Whatever its
choices, however, China’s energy decisions will shake the world.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. His previous book, Blood and Oil, was made into a documentary film and is available at bloodandoilmovie.com. To catch Klare discussing China's energy superpowerdom on Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

September 16, 2010

I got to see the now-famous enthusiasm gap up close and personal last week, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

The backstory: I help run a global warming campaign called 350.org.
In mid-summer, we decided to organize an effort to ask world leaders to
put solar panels on the roofs of their residences. It was to be part of
the lead-up to a gigantic Global Work Party
on October 10th (10-10-10), and a way to give prime ministers and
politburos something easy to do in the hope of getting the fight
against global warming slowly back on track. One of those crucial
leaders is, of course, Barack Obama, who stood by with his arms folded
this summer while the Senate punted on climate-change legislation. We
thought this might be a good way for him to signal that he was still
committed to change, even though he hadn’t managed to pass new laws.

And so we tracked down the solar panels that once had graced the
White House roof, way back in the 1970s under Jimmy Carter. After
Ronald Reagan took them down, they’d spent the last few decades on the
cafeteria roof at Unity College
in rural Maine. That college’s president, Mitch Thomashow, immediately
offered us a panel to take back to the White House. Better still, he
encouraged three of his students to accompany the panel, not to mention
allowing the college’s sustainability coordinators to help manage the
trip.

And so, on the day after Labor Day, we set off in a biodiesel
college van. Solar road trip! Guitars, iPods, excellent snack food,
and for company, the rock star of solar panels, all 6 x 3-feet and 140
pounds of her. We pulled into Boston that first night for a rally at
Old South Church, where a raucous crowd lined up for the chance to sign
the front of the panel, which quickly turned into a giant glass
petition. The same thing the next night in New York, and then DC, with
an evening at one of the city’s oldest churches headlined by the
Reverend Lennox Yearwood, head of the Hip-Hop Caucus.

It couldn’t have been more fun. Wherever we could, we’d fire up the
panel, pour a gallon of water in the top, point it toward the sun, and
eight or nine minutes later you’d have steaming hot water coming out
the bottom. Thirty-one years old and it worked like a charm -- a vexing
reminder that we’ve known how to do this stuff for decades. We just
haven’t done it.

That’s what we kept telling reporters as they turned out along the
route: if the Obamas will put solar panels back on the White House
roof, or on the lawn, or anywhere else where people can see them, it
will help get the message across -- the same way that seed sales
climbed 30% across the country in the year after Michelle planted her
garden.

There was just one nagging concern as we headed south. We still
hadn’t heard anything conclusive from the White House. We’d asked them
-- for two months -- if they’d accept the old panel as a historical
relic returned home, and if they’d commit to installing new ones soon.
We’d even found a company, Sungevity, that was eager to provide them
free. Indeed, as word of our trip spread, other solar companies kept
making the same offer. Still, the White House never really responded,
not until Thursday evening around six p.m. when they suddenly agreed to
a meeting at nine the next morning.

As you might imagine, we were waiting at the “Southwest Appointment
Gate” at 8:45, and eventually someone from the Office of Public
Engagement emerged to escort us inside the Executive Office Building.
He seated us in what he called “the War Room,” an ornate and massive
chamber with a polished table in the middle.

Every window blind was closed. It was a mahogany cave in which we
could just make out two environmental bureaucrats sitting at the far
end of the table. I won’t mention their names, on the theory that what
followed wasn’t really their idea, but orders they were following from
someone else. Because what followed was… uncool.

First,
they spent a lot of time bragging about all the things the federal
government had accomplished environmentally, with special emphasis on
the great work they were doing on other federal buildings. One of them
returned on several occasions to the topic of a government building in
downtown Portland, Oregon, that would soon be fitted with a “green
curtain,” by which I think she meant the “extensive vertical garden”
on the 18-story Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building with its
massive “vegetated fins,” the single largest use of stimulus money in
the entire state.

And actually, it’s kind of great. Still, I doubt many people are
going to build their own vegetated fins, and anyway I was beginning to
despair that nothing could stop the flow of self-praise until one of
the three seniors from Unity raised her hand and politely interrupted.

Now, let me say that I already knew Jean Altomare, Amanda Nelson,
and Jamie Nemecek were special, but my guess is the bureaucrats hadn’t
figured that out. Unity is out in the woods, and these kids were
majoring in things like wildlife conservation. They’d never had an
encounter like this. It stood to reason that they’d be cowed. But they
weren’t.

One after another, respectfully but firmly, they asked a series of
tough questions, and refused to be filibustered by yet another stream
of administration-enhancing data. Here’s what they wanted to know: if
the administration was serious about spreading the word on renewable
energy, why wouldn’t it do the obvious thing and put solar panels on
the White House? When the administrators proudly proffered a clipping
from some interior page of the Washington Post about their “greening the government initiative,” Amanda calmly pointed out that none of her neighbors read the Post, and that, by contrast, the solar panels had made it onto David Letterman.

To their queries, the bureaucrats refused to provide any answer. At
all. One kept smiling in an odd way and saying, “If reporters call and
ask us, we will provide our rationale,” but whatever it was, they
wouldn’t provide it to us.

It was all a little odd, to say the least. They refused to accept
the Carter panel as a historic relic, or even to pose for a picture
with the students and the petition they’d brought with them. Asked to
do something easy and symbolic to rekindle a little of the joy that had
turned out so many of us as volunteers for Obama in 2008, they point
blank said no. In a less than overwhelming gesture, they did, however,
pass out Xeroxed copies of a 2009 memorandum from Vice President Biden
about federal energy policy.

I can tell you exactly what it felt like, because those three
students were brave and walked out graciously, heads high, and kept
their tears back until we got to the sidewalk. And then they didn’t
keep them back, because it’s a tough thing to learn for the first time
how politics can work.

If you want to know about the much-discussed enthusiasm gap between
Democratic and Republican bases, in other words, this was it in action.
As Jean Altomare told the New York Times,
“We went in without any doubt about the importance of this. They handed
us a pamphlet.” And Amanda Nelson added, “I didn’t expect I’d get to
shake President Obama’s hand, but it was really shocking to me to find
out that they really didn’t seem to care.”

Did I say I was impressed with these young women? I was more than
impressed. Nobody I went to Harvard with would have handled it as
powerfully as they did (maybe because they weren’t looking for a job in
the White House someday). A few hot tears were the right response,
followed by getting on with the work.

Our next question, out there on the sidewalk, was how to handle the
situation -- which, indeed, we had to do right away, because in today’s
blog-speed world, you’re supposed to Put Out a Statement to reporters,
not to mention Tweet. So how to play it?

The normal way is to claim some kind of victory: we could have said
we had an excellent exchange of views, and that the administration had
taken seriously our plea. But that would have been lying, and at
350.org, we long ago decided not to do that. The whole premise of our
operation, beginning with the number at its core, is that we had better always tell the truth about our actual predicament.

Alternatively, we could have rounded on the administration, and
taken our best shot. In fact, it would have been easy enough right then
and there for me to chain myself to the White House fence with the
panel next to me. It would have gotten some serious press (though not
as much as if I’d burned a Koran). And in fact, some of our supporters
were counseling that I head for the fence immediately.

We got an email, for instance, from a veteran campaigner I deeply
respect who said: “Show Obama you can't be taken for granted, and I
predict you will be amazed at the good things that come your way. This
is a watershed moment: if they think they can get away with this with
you, they'll judge they can get away with more in the future. If you
show them they can't get away with it (at the very least without
embarrassment), they will come your way more in the future. It's power
politics, pure and simple. This is how the game is played. Get their
respect!”

And I think he was probably right. As he pointed out, Obama was
even then on the phone with the mustachioed Florida geezer, the stack
of Korans, and the following of 50 or less. But I couldn’t do it, not
then and there. Because… well, because at some level I’m a political
wuss.

I couldn’t stand to make that enthusiasm gap any wider, not seven
weeks before an election. True, it’s the moment when you have some
leverage, but no less true: the other side was running candidate after
candidate who literally couldn’t wait to boast about how they didn’t
believe in climate change. (Check out R.L. Miller’s highly useful list of ‘climate zombies.’) That’s why we’re deeply engaged in fights this fall like the battle to defeat California’s Prop 23
and save the state’s landmark climate law. As a group we can’t endorse
candidates, but I came home and spent part of the weekend mailing small
checks to Senate candidates I admire, men like Paul Hodes from New Hampshire, who have fought hard for serious climate legislation.

And a confession. We’d walked past Obama’s official portrait on the
way out and, despite the meeting we’d just had, I couldn’t help but
smile at the thought that he was president. I could remember my own
enthusiasm from two years ago that had me knocking on doors across New
Hampshire. I admired his character and his smarts, and if I admire them
a little less now, the residue’s still there.

And so I couldn’t help thinking -- part of me at least -- like this:
the White House political team has decided that if they put solar
panels up on the roof, Fox News will use that as one more line of
attack; that they somehow believe the association with Jimmy Carter is
the electoral equivalent of cooties; and that, in the junior high
school lunchroom that now comprises our political life, they didn’t
want to catch any.

If that’s their thinking, I doubt they’re on the mark. As far as I
can tell, the right has a far better understanding of the power of
symbols. Witness the furor they’ve kicked up over “the Mosque at
Ground Zero.” My feeling is: we should use the symbols we’ve got, and
few are better than a solar panel. Still, with the current craziness in
mind, I was willing to give them a pass. So we just put out a press
release saying that we’d failed in our mission and walked away.

At least for now, but not forever, and really not for much longer.

On October 10th, we’re having our great global work party, and ever since Obama stiffed us, registrations for its events have been soaring. Last week, with the heads of Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network, I issued a call
for ideas about how to mount a campaign of civil disobedience around
climate. Not a series of stunts, but a real campaign. At coal plants,
and drilling sites -- and at the places where our politicians do their
work.

Actually, I’ll be surprised if the White House doesn’t put up solar
panels within a year. But even if they do, that would just be the
barest of beginnings. We’ve run out of spare decades to deal with
climate change -- the summer’s events in the Arctic, in Russia, in Pakistan
proved that with great clarity. I may be a wuss, but I’m also
scientifically literate. We know what we need to do, and we will do it.
Enthusiastically.

September 14, 2010

Yes, it would be funny if it weren’t so grim. After all, when it
comes to squandering money and resources in strange and distant places
(or even here at home), you can count on the practitioners of
American-style war to be wildly over the top.

Oh, those madcap Pentagon bureaucrats and the zany horde of generals
and admirals who go with them! Give them credit: no one on Earth knows
how to throw a war like they do -- and they never go home.

In fact, when it comes to linking “profligate” to "war," with all
the lies, manipulations, and cost overruns that give it that proverbial
pizzazz, Americans should stand tall. We are absolutely #1!

Hence, the very first TomDispatch American Way of War Quiz.
Admittedly, it covers only the last four weeks of war news you wouldn’t
believe if it weren’t in the papers, but we could have done this for
any month since October 2001.

Now’s your chance to pit your wits (and your ability to suspend
disbelief) against the best the Pentagon has to offer -- and we’re
talking about all seventeen-and-a-half miles of corridors in that
five-sided, five-story edifice that has triple the square footage of
the Empire State Building. To weigh your skills on the TomDispatch
Scales of War™, take the 11-question pop quiz below, checking your
answers against ours (with accompanying explanations), and see if you
deserve to be a four-star general, a gun-totin’ mercenary, or a mere
private.

1.With
President Obama’s Afghan surge of 30,000 U.S. troops complete, an
administration review of war policy due in December, and fears rising
that new war commander General David Petraeus might then ask for more
troops, what did the general do last week?

a. He informed the White House that he now
had too many troops for reasonable operations in Afghanistan and
proposed that a drawdown begin immediately.

b. He assured the White House that he was satisfied
with the massive surge in troops (civilian employees, contractors, and
CIA personnel) and would proceed as planned.

c. He asked for more troops now.

Correct answer: c. General Petraeus has already reportedly requested an extra mini-surge
of 2,000 more troops from NATO, and probably from U.S. reserves as
well, including more trainers for the Afghan military. In interviews
as August ended, he was still insisting
that he had “the structures, people, concepts, and resources required
to carry out a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency
campaign.” But that was the summer silly season. This is September, a
time for cooler heads and larger demands.

2.With President Obama’s announced July 2011 drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan in mind, the Pentagon has already:

a. Begun organizing an orderly early 2011
withdrawal of troops from combat outposts and forward operating bases
to larger facilities to facilitate the president’s plan.

b. Launched a new U.S. base-building binge in
Afghanistan, including contracts for three $100 million facilities not
to be completed, no less completely occupied, until late 2011.

c. Announced plans to shut down Kandahar Air Base’s
covered boardwalk, including a TGI Friday’s, a Kentucky Fried Chicken,
and a Mamma Mia’s Pizzeria, and cancelled the opening of a Nathan’s
Famous Hot Dogs as part of its preparations for an American drawdown.

Correct answer: b. According to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, construction is slated to begin on at least three $100 million air base projects
-- “a $100 million area at Shindand Air Base for Special Operations
helicopters and unmanned intelligence and surveillance aircraft”;
another $100 million to expand the airfield at Camp Dwyer, a Marine
base in Helmand Province, also to support Special Operations forces;
and a final $100 million for expanded air facilities at Mazar-e Sharif
in northern Afghanistan. None of these projects are to be completed
until well after July 2011. “[R]equests for $1.3 billion in additional
fiscal 2011 funds for multiyear construction of military facilities in
Afghanistan are pending before Congress.” And fear not, there are no indications that the fast-food joints at Kandahar are going anywhere.

3.The U.S. military has more generals and admirals than:

a. Al-Qaeda members in Yemen.

b. Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan.

c. Al-Qaeda members in Pakistan.

d. Al-Qaeda members in all three countries.

Correct answer: a, b, c, and d. According to CIA Director Leon Panetta, there are 50 to 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, possibly less. Best estimates suggest that there are perhaps “several hundred” al-Qaeda members in poverty-stricken, desertifying, strife-torn Yemen. There are also an estimated “several hundred”
members and leaders of the original al-Qaeda in the Pakistani
borderlands. The high-end total for al-Qaeda members in the three
countries, then, would be 800, though the actual figure could be
significantly smaller. According to Ginger Thompson and Thom Shanker of
the New York Times, the U.S. military has 963 generals and admirals,
approximately 100 more than on September 11, 2001. (The average salary
for a general, by the way, is $180,000, which means that the cost of
these “stars,” not including pensions, health-care plans, and perks, is
approximately $170 million a year.) The U.S. military has 40
four-star generals and admirals at the moment, which may represent more
star-power than there are al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that, as a
belt-tightening measure, he might cut the top-heavy U.S. military by 50
positions -- that is, by half the increase since 9/11.

4.With the U.S. military obliged, by agreement
with the Iraqi government, to withdraw all U.S. military personnel from
Iraq by the end of 2011, the Pentagon has:

a. Decided that, in the interests of Iraqi
sovereignty and to save U.S. taxpayers money, all U.S. troops will
depart ahead of schedule, leaving Iraq no later than next February.

b. Instituted austerity measures, halted
renovations on remaining American bases, and handed over all base
construction efforts to the Iraqi government.

c. Continued to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into military base improvements.

Correct answer: c. Jackie Soohen recently toured Balad Air Base in Central Iraq for Democracy Now! That base, described in the past as an American town,
has, she points out, “three large gyms, multiple shopping centers,
recreation areas, and a movie theater,” not to speak of multiple bus
routes and the usual range of fast-food parlors, PXs, and the like.
The base, she reports, is still expanding and “on bases like this
one..., the military continues to invest hundred of millions in
infrastructure improvements, and it is difficult to imagine them fully
abandoning everything they are building here.” They are, in fact, not
likely to do so anytime soon. There are still more than 5,800
U.S. Air Force personnel in Iraq. Thanks to previous American
policies, that country, which once had a large air force, today has
only a rudimentary one. The new Iraqi air force is now eager
to purchase its first jet fighters, F-16s from Lockheed Martin, but no
agreement has been signed or date set for delivery. The Iraqis will
still need further years of pilot training to fly those planes when
they do arrive in 2013 or later. In the meantime, the U.S. Air Force
is almost guaranteed to be the Iraqi Air Force, and U.S. Air Force
personnel will undoubtedly remain at Balad Air Base in significant
numbers, “withdrawal” or no.

5.What did the Pentagon recently hand over to Iraq?

a. A check for one trillion dollars to reconstruct
a country which the U.S. invasion and occupation plunged into a ruinous
civil war that cost millions of Iraqis their homes, their jobs, their
economic security, their peace of mind, or their lives.

b. An IOU for two trillion dollars to reconstruct a
country which the U.S. invasion and occupation plunged into a ruinous
civil war that cost millions of Iraqis their homes, their jobs, their
economic security, their peace of mind, or their lives.

c. Some hot air.

Correct answer: c. We’ll bet you didn’t know that, in 2003, the
U.S. military occupied not only the land of Iraq, but its air, too.
Just recently, according to
a Pentagon press-release-cum-news-story, “the U.S. Air Force handed
over the Kirkuk sector of airspace, 15,000 feet and above, to the ICAA
[Iraq Civil Aviation Authority] at Baghdad International Airport.” In
November, the U.S. plans to hand over even more hot air, this time in
the south of the country -- but not all of it. Iraq will not control
all of its air until some time in 2011.
Of course, once they have their air back, the Iraqi Air Force will only
need planes and trained pilots to make use of it. (See question 4.)

6.The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, a
“combat-capable brigade-sized unit,” has been deployed three times
(according to the U.S. Army) “during Operation Iraqi Freedom -- serving
successfully in tough areas including Fallujah, Tall Afar, Ramadi, and
Baghdad.” Its lead elements were recently sent from Fort Hood, Texas,
to where?

a. Afghanistan as the final installment of President Obama’s surge of U.S. troops into that country.

b. Camp Justice, the U.S. military base in Oman, as a warning to insurgents in neighboring Yemen.

c. Camp Darby in Livorno, Italy, because the war there didn’t end all that long ago and, besides, Switzerland sits threateningly to the north.

d. Juarez, Mexico, because Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton recently declared Mexico’s drug war an “insurgency,”
and insurgencies are now an area of U.S. military expertise.

e. Iraq, the country that the “last U.S. combat troops” left less than a month ago.

Correct
answer: e. Of course, the "Brave Rifles," as the unit is known, are
not -- we repeat not -- combat troops. They’re just, says the Army,
“combat capable.” Yes, they’re trained for combat. But take our word
for it, they’re NOT combat troops. Yes they’re well armed. But NOT
for combat. And yes, they’re an “Armored Cavalry” unit. But it’s NOT
about combat, OK? They’re in Iraq strictly in an “advise and assist” capacity. Did we mention that they aren’t a combat unit?

7.With the U.S. military occupation of Iraq
due to end in 2011, the American mission there is officially being left
to the State Department, representing the civilian side of U.S. foreign
policy, which is planning to:

a. Spend about $1.5 billion dollars to set up and
run two embassy branch offices and two or more “enduring presence
posts” (they used to be called “consulates”), including hiring the
necessary armed private contractors.

b. Employ 2,400 people in its (“largest in the
world”) embassy, the size of the Vatican (but far better defended) in
Baghdad’s Green Zone and at its other posts.

c. More than double its force of private civilian
contractors to 6,000-7,000, arm them with cast-off Pentagon heavy
weaponry and Apache helicopters, and form them into “quick reaction
teams.”

d. Spend another $800 million on a program to train the Iraqi police.

e. Take on more than 1,200 specific tasks previously handled by the U.S. military.

Correct answer: a, b, c, d, and e (and even they don’t cover the subject adequately). Michael Gordon of the New York Timessupplied most of the numbers above. Who knows what those 1,200 previously military tasks may be, but, reports the Nation’s
Jeremy Scahill, those five “enduring presence posts” are to be set up
on what are now U.S. military bases, assumedly so that the Pentagon's
costly base-building won’t go completely to waste. It all represents a
unique arrangement, since the civilian State Department’s corps of
mercenary warriors will then be used
to “operate radar to warn of enemy fire, search for roadside bombs, and
fly surveillance drones,” among other jobs. Oh, and good news -- if
you happen to be a private contractor at least -- that police-training
program will be run by private contractors; and even better, just in
case the private contractors don’t act on the up-and-up, there will be
people specially assigned
to provide oversight and they will be... private contractors, of
course. How can the new diplomats from the remodeled five-sided State
Department go wrong, advancing as they are encased in the latest
mine-resistant vehicles known as MRAPS and ever prepared to give peace
a chance?

8.When private military contractor Blackwater
(now known as Xe Services) found itself in hot water after some of its
guards slaughtered 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square in 2007, the
company responded by:

b. Vowing to avoid all armed work in the future and
to transform the company into a community-services and elderly care
operation.

c. Setting up at least 31 shell companies and
subsidiaries through which it could still be awarded contracts by the
State Department, the CIA, and the U.S. Army without embarrassment to
anyone.

Correct answer: c. So James Risen and Mark Mazzetti reported earlier this month in the New York Times.
The company, which is “facing a string of legal problems, including the
indictment in April of five former Blackwater officials on weapons and
obstruction charges, and civil suits stemming from the 2007 shootings
in Iraq,” hasn’t suffered in pocket-book terms. Just this year, it
received contracts for $120 million to provide the State Department with security in Afghanistan, and another $100 million
to protect the CIA in Afghanistan and elsewhere. (The Agency has
awarded Blackwater and its shell companies $600 million since 2001,
according to Risen and Mazzetti.)

9.Recently, Iran unveiled a new armed drone,
billed as a long-range unmanned aerial bomber and dubbed the
“Ambassador of Death” by the country’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Afterwards, the Pentagon:

a. Cut out drone strikes in Pakistan to
send Iran a message that conducting regular attacks on a country with
which you are not officially at war is impermissible.

b. Announced plans to rethink the fast-and-loose
rules of robotic assassination used in its Terminator wars for the
better part of a decade so that Iran could not cite U.S. actions as
precedent.

c. Stepped up drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, sometimes carrying out more than one a day.

Correct answer: c. In discussing Washington’s desire to export
drone technology to allies, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has termed
Iranian drones a “concern.” The U.S. has, however, not only continued
to pave the way for Iran (and every other nation and non-state actor)
to conduct drone attacks with utter impunity, but accelerated the process. For his part, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley recently echoed Gates, calling Iran’s dronesa “concern to us and concern to Iran’s neighbors.” Of the new Iranian drone’s hyperbolic unofficial moniker, he said with a laugh, “It’s a curious name for a system.” Perhaps he’s unaware that his own government has dubbed
its two marquee armed drones -- with a straight face, mind you --
Predator and Reaper (as in “Grim...”) and that those aircraft launch
“Hellfire” missiles. The official name of the Iranian drone is actually the least inflammatory of the three: “Karrar” or "striker."

10.Five hundred million dollars is approximately the amount:

a. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
pledged in July to development projects for Pakistan to “build broader
support for the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.”

b. Afghanistan’s troubled Kabul Bank had in cash just weeks ago before its panicked depositors bled it dry.

c. The amount of money the U.S. military will spend on its musical bands this year.

Correct answer: a, b, and c. According to the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, the U.S. military may now spend $500 million or more annually on its musical bands -- the U.S. Army alone has more than 100
of them -- the same amount used to sway a critically impoverished
country of 166 million people in what’s been portrayed as a
multigenerational war of paramount importance. At least Kabul Bank now knows where to go for a loan, assuming that Afghans will accept trombones instead of cash.

Blast-from-the-Past Bonus Question

11. Who said, “I think for us to get American
military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally
be a quagmire”?

a. Bob Dylan, mumbled during a live performance in April 2002.

b. Dick Cheney in 1991 when he was George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense.

c. George Steinbrenner in an interview with the New York Daily News after the Yankees won the 1998 World Series.

Correct answer: b. If only Cheney had listened to himself when he
became vice president. “Several years after occupied Iraq had become
the quagmire he once warned about,” writes historian John Dower in his
striking new book Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq,
“Cheney was asked how to reconcile what he argued in 1991 and
disregarded later. ‘Well, I stand by what I said in ’91,’ he replied.
‘But look what’s happened since then -- we had 9/11.’” Sigh.

And believe it or not, folks, that’s it for the wild and wacky world
of American war this month. If you answered at least 10 of the American Way of War Quiz
questions correctly, consider yourself a four-star general. If you
answered 5 to 9 correctly, you qualify as a gun totin’ mercenary (with
all the usual Lord of the Flies perks). If you did worse, you’re a buck private in a U.S. Army woodwind ensemble that’s just been dispatched to Camp Dwyer in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan(Verso Books),has
just been published. He discusses why withdrawal hasn't been on the
American agenda in Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview,
which can be accessed by clicking here or downloaded to your iPod here. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. His website is NickTurse.com.

September 07, 2010

The Military’s Media Megaphone and the U.S. Global Military Presence By Tom Engelhardt

The fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan’s “The Transformer,” an article-cum-interview with
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. It received a flurry of attention
because Gates indicated he might leave his post “sometime in 2011.”
The most significant two lines in the piece, however, were so ordinary
that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering. Part of a
Kaplan summary of Gates’s views, they read: “He favors substantial
increases in the military budget... He opposes any slacking off in
America's global military presence.”

Now, if Kaplan had done a similar interview with Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, such lines might have been throwaways, since a
secretary of state is today little more than a fancy facilitator, ever
less central to what that magazine, with its outmoded name, might still
call “foreign policy.” Remind me: When was the last time you heard
anyone use that phrase -- part of a superannuated world in which
“diplomats” and “diplomacy” were considered important -- in a
meaningful way? These days “foreign policy” and “global policy” are
increasingly a single fused, militarized entity, at least across what
used to be called “the Greater Middle East,” where what’s at stake is
neither war nor peace, but that "military presence."

As a result, Gates’s message couldn’t be clearer: despite two disastrous wars and a global war on terror now considered “multigenerational” by those in the know, trillions of
lost dollars, and staggering numbers of deaths (if you happen to
include Iraqi and Afghan ones), the U.S. military mustn’t in any way
slack off. The option of reducing the global mission -- the one that’s
never on the table when “all options are on the table” -- should remain
nowhere in sight. That’s Gates’s bedrock conviction. And when he opposes any diminution of the global mission, it matters.

Slicing Up the World Like a Pie

As we know from a Peter Baker front-page New York Timesprofile of
Barack Obama as commander-in-chief, the 49-year-old president “with no
experience in uniform” has “bonded” with Gates, the 66-year-old former
spymaster, all-around-apparatchik,
and holdover from the last years of the Bush era. Baker describes
Gates as the president’s “most important tutor,” and on matters
military like the Afghan War, the president has reportedly “deferred to
him repeatedly.”

Let’s face
it, though: deference has become the norm for the Pentagon and U.S.
military commanders, which is not so surprising. After all, in terms
of where our money goes, the Pentagon is the 800-pound gorilla in just
about any room. It has, for instance, left the State Department in the
proverbial dust. By now, it gets at least $12 dollars for
every dollar of funding that goes to the State Department, which in
critical areas of the world has become an adjunct of the military.

In addition, the Pentagon has taken under its pilotless predatory wing such previously civilian tasks as delivering humanitarian aid and “nation-building.” As Secretary of Defense Gates has pointed out, there are more Americans in U.S. military bands than there are foreign service officers.

If it’s true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then
you can gauge the power of the Pentagon by the fact that, at least in
Iraq after 2011, the State Department is planning to become a
mini-military -- an armed outfit
using equipment borrowed from the Pentagon and an “army” of mercenary
guards formed into “quick reaction forces,” all housed in a series of
new billion-dollar “fortified compounds,” no longer called “consulates” but “enduring presence posts”
(as the Pentagon once called its giant bases in Iraq “enduring
camps”). This level of militarization of what might once have been
considered the Department of Peaceful Solutions to Difficult Problems
is without precedent and an indicator of the degree to which the
government is being militarized.

Similarly, according to the Washington Post, the Pentagon has managed to take control of more than two-thirds of the “intelligence programs” in the vast world of the U.S. Intelligence Community,
with its 17 major agencies and organizations. Ever since the
mid-1980s, it has also divided much of the globe like a pie into slices
called “commands.” (Our own continent joined the crew as the U.S.
Northern Command, or Northcom, in 2002, and Africa, as Africom in 2007.)

Before stepping down a notch to become Afghan war commander, General
David Petraeus was U.S. Central Command (Centcom) commander, which
meant military viceroy for an especially heavily garrisoned expanse of the planet stretching from Egypt to the Chinese border. Increasingly, in fact, there is no space, including outer space and virtual space, where our military is uninterested in maintaining or establishing a “presence.”

On October 1st, for instance, a new Cyber Command headed by a four-star general and staffed by 1,000 “elite military hackers and spies” is tohit
the keyboards typing. And there will be nothing shy about its
particular version of “presence” either. The Bush-era concept of
“preventive war” (that is, a war of aggression) may have been discarded
by the Obama administration, but the wizards of the new Cyber Command
are boldly trying to go where the Bush administration once went. They
are reportedly eager to establish a virtual war-fighting principle
(labeled “active defense”) under which they could preemptively attack
and knock out the computer networks of adversaries.

And the White House and environs haven’t been immune to creeping
militarization either. As presidents are now obliged to praise
American troops to the skies in any “foreign policy” speech -- “Our
troops are the steel
in our ship of state” -- they also turn ever more regularly to military
figures in civilian life and for civilian posts. President Obama’s
National Security Adviser, James Jones, is a retired Marine four-star
general, and from the Bush years the president kept on
Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute as “war czar,” just as he
appointed retired Army Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry as our
ambassador to Afghanistan, and recently replaced retired admiral Dennis
Blair with retired Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper as the
Director of National Intelligence. (He also kept on David Petraeus,
George W. Bush’s favorite general, and hiked the already staggering Pentagon budget in Bushian fashion.)

And this merely skims the surface of the nonstop growth of the
Pentagon and its influence. One irony of that process: even as the
U.S. military has failed repeatedly
to win wars, its budgets have grown ever more gargantuan, its sway in
Washington ever greater, and its power at home ever more obvious.

Generals and Admirals Mouthing Off

To grasp the changing nature of military influence domestically,
consider the military’s relationship to the media. Its media megaphone
offers a measure of the reach and influence of that behemoth, what
kinds of pressures it can apply in support of its own version of
foreign policy, and just how, under its weight, the relationship
between the civilian and military high commands is changing.

It’s true that, in June, the president relieved Afghan War commander
General Stanley McChrystal of duty after his war-frustrated associates
drank and mouthed off about administration officials in an inanely
derogatory manner in his presence -- and the presence of a Rolling Stone magazine reporter. ("Biden?... Did you say: Bite Me?") But think of that as the exception that proves the rule.

It’s seldom noted that less obvious but more serious -- and
egregious -- breaches of civilian/military protocol are becoming the
norm, and increasingly no one blinks or acts. To take just a few recent
examples, in late August commandant of the Marine Corps General James
Conway, due to retire this fall, publicly attacked the president’s
“conditions-based” July 2011 drawdown date in Afghanistan, saying, "In some ways, we think right now it is probably giving our enemy sustenance."

Or consider that, while the Obama administration has moved fiercely against government and military leaking of every sort,
when it came to the strategic leaking (assumedly by someone in, or
close to, the military) of the “McChrystal plan” for Afghanistan in the
fall of 2009, nothing at all happened even though the president was
backed into a policy-making corner. And yet, as Andrew Bacevich pointed out,
“The McChrystal leaker provid[ed] Osama bin Laden and the Taliban
leadership a detailed blueprint of exactly how the United States and
its allies were going to prosecute their war.”

Meanwhile,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, on a
three-day cross-country “tour” of Midwestern business venues
(grandiloquently labeled “Conversations with the Country”), attacked
the national debt as “the most significant threat to our national
security.” Anodyne as this might sound, with election 2010
approaching, the national debt couldn’t be a more political issue.

There should be, but no longer is, something startling about all
this. Generals and admirals now mouth off regularly on a wide range of
policy issues, appealing to the American public both directly and via
deferential (sometimes fawning) reporters, pundits, and commentators.
They and their underlings clearly leak news repeatedly for tactical
advantage in policy-making situations. They organize what are
essentially political-style barnstorming campaigns for what once would
have been “foreign policy” positions, and increasingly this is just the
way the game is played.

From Combat to Commentary

There’s a history still to be written about how our highest military commanders came to never shut up.

Certainly, in 1990 as Gulf War I was approaching, Americans
experienced the first full flowering of a new form of militarized
“journalism” in which, among other things, retired high military
officers, like so many play-by-play analysts on Monday Night Football,
became regular TV news consultants. They were called upon to narrate
and analyze the upcoming battle (“showdown in the Gulf”), the brief
offensive that followed, and the aftermath in something close to real
time. Amid nifty logos, dazzling Star Wars-style graphics,
theme music, and instant-replay nose-cone snuff films of “precision”
weapons wiping out the enemy, they offered a running commentary on the
progress of battle as well as on the work of commanders in the field,
some of whom they might have once served with.

And that was just the beginning of the way, after years of
post-Vietnam War planning, the Pentagon took control of the media
battlefield and so the popular portrayal of American-style war. In the
past, the reporting of war had often been successfully controlled by
governments, while generals had polished their images with the press or
-- like Omar Bradley and Douglas MacArthur -- even employed public
relations staffs to do it for them. But never had generals and war
planners gone before the public as actors, supported by all the means a
studio could muster on their behalf and determined to produce a program
that would fill the day across the dial for the full time of a war.
The military even had a version of a network Standards and Practices
department with its guidelines for on-air acceptability. Military
handlers made decisions -- like refusing to clear for publication the
fact that Stealth pilots viewed X-rated movies before missions --
reminiscent of network show-vetting practices.

When it came time for Gulf War II, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the
military had added the practice of putting reporters through pre-war
weeklong “boot camps” and then “embedding” them with the troops (a Stockholm Syndrome-type experience that many American reporters grew to love). It also built itself a quarter-million-dollar
stage set for nonstop war briefings at Centcom headquarters in Doha,
Qatar. All of this was still remarkably new in the history of
relations between the Pentagon and the media, but it meant that the
military could address the public more or less directly both through
those embedded reporters and over the shoulders of that assembled
gaggle of media types in Doha.

As long as war took its traditional form, this approach worked well,
but once it turned into a protracted and inchoate guerrilla struggle,
and “war” and “wartime” became the endless (often dismal) norm,
something new was needed. In the Bush years, the Pentagon responded to
endless war in part by sending out
an endless stream of well-coached, well-choreographed retired military
“experts” to fill the gaping maw of cable news. In the meantime,
something quite new has developed.

Today,
you no longer need to be a retired military officer to offer
play-by-play commentary on and analysis of our wars. Now, at certain
moments, the main narrators of those wars turn out to be none other
than the generals running, or overseeing, them. They regularly get
major airtime to explain to the American public how those wars are
going, as well as to expound on their views on more general issues.

This is something new. Among the American commanders of World War
II and the Korean War, only Douglas MacArthur did anything faintly like
this, which made him an outlier (or perhaps an omen) and in a sense
that's why President Harry Truman fired him. Generals Eisenhower,
Patton, Ridgeway, et al., did not think to go on media tours touting
their own political lines while in uniform.

Admittedly, Vietnam War commander General William Westmoreland was
an early pioneer of the form. He had, however, been pushed onto the
stage to put a public face on the American war effort by President
Lyndon Johnson, who was desperate to buck up public opinion.
Westmoreland returned from Vietnam
in 1968 just before the disastrous Tet Offensive for a “whirlwind tour”
of the country and uplifting testimony before Congress. In a speech at
the National Press Club, he spoke of reaching “an important point where
the end begins to come into view,” and later in a televised press
conference, even more infamously used the phrase “the light at the end
of tunnel.” Events would soon discredit his optimism.

Still, we’ve reached quite a different level of military/media
confluence today. Take the two generals now fighting our Afghan and
Iraq wars: General Petraeus and General Ray Odierno -- one arriving,
the other leaving.

Having spent six weeks assessing the Afghan situation and convinced
that he needed to buy more time for his war from the American public,
in mid-August Petraeus launched a full-blown, well-organized media tour
from his headquarters in Kabul. In it, he touted “progress” in
Afghanistan, offered comments subtly but visibly at odds with the president’s promised July 2011 drawdown date, and generally evangelized for his war. He began with an hour-long interview with Dexter Filkins of the New York Times and another with Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post.
These were timed to be released on August 15th, the morning he
appeared on NBC’s Sunday political show “Meet the Press.” (Moderator
David Gregory traveled to the Afghan capital to toss softball questions
at Washington’s greatest general and watch him do push-ups in a “special edition” of the show.) Petraeus then followed up with a Katie Couric interview on CBS Evening News, as part of an all-fronts “media blitz” that would include Fox News, AP, Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, and in a bow to the allies, the BBC and even NATO TV, among other places.

At almost the same moment, General Odierno was ending his tour of
duty as Iraq war commander by launching a goodbye media blitz of his
own from Baghdad, which included interviews with ABC’s “This Week,” Bob Schieffer of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, CNN’s “State of the Union,”PBS Newshour, and the New York Times, among
others. He, too, had a policy line to promote and he, too, expressed
himself in ways subtly but visibly at odds with an official Obama
position, emphasizing the possibility that some number of U.S. troops
might need to stay in Iraq beyond the 2011 departure deadline. As he
said to Schieffer, "If [the Iraqis] ask us that they might want us to
stay longer, we certainly would consider that.” Offering another
scenario as well, he also suggested that, as Reuters put it,
“U.S. troops... could move back to a combat role if there was ‘a
complete failure of the security forces’ or if political divisions
split Iraqi security forces.” (He then covered his flanks by adding,
“but we don’t see that happening.”)

This urge to stay represents one long-term strain of thinking in the military and among Pentagon civilians, and it will undoubtedly prove a powerful force for the president to deal with or defer to in 2011. In February 2009, less than a month after Obama took office, Odierno was already broadcasting his desire to have up to 35,000 troops remain in Iraq after 2011, and at the end of 2009, Gates was already suggesting
that a new round of negotiations with a future Iraqi government might
extend our stay for years. All this, of course, could qualify as part
of a more general campaign to maintain the Pentagon’s 800-pound status,
the military’s clout, and that global military presence.

A Chorus of Military Intellectuals

Pentagon
foreign policy is regularly seconded by a growing cadre of what might
be called military intellectuals at think tanks scattered around
Washington. Such figures, many of them qualifying as “warrior pundits”
and “warrior journalists,” include: Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security and Petraeus adviser; former U.S. Army officer Andrew Exum, fellow at the Center for a New American Security, founder of the Abu Muqawama website, and a McChrystal advisor; former Australian infantry officer and Petraeus adviser David Kilcullen, non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security; Thomas Ricks, formerly of the Washington Post, author of the bestselling Iraq War books Fiasco and The Gamble, Petraeus admirer, and senior fellow at the same center; Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, the man Gates credits with turning around his thinking on Afghanistan and a recent Petraeus hiree in Afghanistan; Kimberley Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, an adviser to both Petraeus and McChrystal;Kenneth Pollack, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution;andStephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and another Petraeus as well as McChrystal adviser.These
figures, and numerous others like them, are repeatedly invited to U.S.
war zones by the military, flattered, toured, given face time with
commanders, sometimes hired
by them, and sometimes even given the sense that they are the ones
planning our wars. They then return to Washington to offer
sophisticated, “objective” versions of the military line.

Toss into this mix the former neocons who caused so much of the damage in the early Bush years and who regularly return at key moments as esteemed media “experts” (not the fools and knaves they were), including former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz,former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) L. Paul Bremer III, and former senior advisor to the CPA Noah Feldman,
among others. For them, being wrong means never having to say you’re
sorry. And, of course, they and their thoughts are dealt with
remarkably respectfully, while those who were against the Iraq War from
the beginning remain scarce commodities on op-ed pages,as sources in news articles, and on the national radio and TV news.

This combined crew of former warriors, war-zone bureaucrats, and warrior pundits are, like Odierno, now plunking
for a sizeable residual U.S. military force to stay in Iraq until hell
freezes over. They regularly compare Iraq to post-war South Korea,
where U.S. troops are still garrisoned nearly 60 years after the Korean
War and which, after decades of U.S.-supported dictators, now has a
flourishing democracy.

Combine the military intellectuals, the former neocons, the war
commanders, the retired military-officer-commentators, the Secretary of
Defense and other Pentagon civilians and you have an impressive array
of firepower of a sort that no Eisenhower, Ridgeway, or even MacArthur
could have imagined. They may disagree fiercely with each other on tactical matters
when it comes to pursuing American-style war, and they certainly don’t
represent the views of a monolithic military. There are undoubtedly
generals who have quite a different view of what the defense of the
United States entails. As a crew, though, civilian and military, in
and out of uniform, in the Pentagon or in a war zone, they agree
forcefully on the need to maintain that American global military
presence over the long term.

Producing War

Other than Gates, the key figure of the moment is clearly Petraeus,
who might be thought of as our Teflon general. He could represent a
genuine challenge to the fading tradition of civilian control of the
military. Treated
as a demi-god and genius of battle on both sides of the aisle in
Washington, he would be hard for any president, especially this one, to
remove from office. As a four-star who would have to throw a punch at
Michelle Obama on national television to get fired, he minimally has
significant latitude to pursue the war policies of his choice in
Afghanistan. He also has -- should he care to exercise it -- the
potential and the opening to pursue much more. It’s not completely
farfetched to imagine him as the first mini-Caesar-in-waiting of our
American times.

As of yet, he and other top figures may plan their individual media
blitzes, but they are not consciously planning a media strategy for a
coherent Pentagon foreign policy. The result is all the more chilling
for not being fully coordinated, and for being so little noticed or
attended to by the media that play such a role in promoting it. What’s
at stake here goes well beyond the specific issue of military
insubordination that usually comes up when military-civilian relations
are discussed. After all, we could be seeing, in however inchoate
form, the beginning of a genuine Pentagon/military production in
support of Pentagon timing (as in the new bases now being built
in Afghanistan that won’t even be completed until late 2011), our
global military presence, and the global mission that goes with it.

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, you can see that Pentagon
version of an American foreign policy straining to be born. In the
end, of course, it could be stillborn, but it could also become an
all-enveloping system offering Americans a strange, skewed vision of a
world constantly at war and of the importance of planning for more of
the same.

To the extent that it now exists, it is dominated by the vision of
figures who, judging from the last near decade, have a particularly
constrained sense of American priorities, have been deeply immersed in
the imperial mayhem that our wars have created, have left us armed to
the teeth and flailing
at ghosts and demons, and are still enmeshed in the process by which
American treasure has been squandered to worse than no purpose in
distant lands.

Nothing in the record indicates that anyone should listen to what
these men have to say. Nothing in the record indicates that Washington
won’t be all ears, the media won’t remain an enthusiastic conduit, and
Americans won’t follow their lead.

[Source note: For a basic source on the decline of the State Department, Stephen Glain’s 2009 Nation piece “The American Leviathan”
is still the place to start. For those of you who would like more on
the history of how the Pentagon organized war in the post-Vietnam era
and the tumultuous Bush years, consider getting your hands on the
revised, updated version of my book, The End of Victory Culture,
and checking out the sections entitled “Afterlife” and “Victory
Culture, the Sequel.” Among the recent “all options on the table”
statements, this one from Petraeus's Washington Post
interview caught my attention: “One policy [General Petraeus] has opted
not to continue, however, is his predecessor's asceticism. He suggested
that the fast-food restaurants McChrystal ordered closed on bases
probably will reopen soon. ‘With respect to Burger Kings, all options are on the table,’ he said.”]